🎰 A Busy Week For DApps — Issue No. 7
/🗞 News
The high-profile Augur project has launched. The decentralized prediction market, built with Ethereum smart contracts, is one of the more interesting DApps to date. LinkMeanwhile, another high profile DApp has been hacked. The Bancor decentralized exchange lost 25,000 ETH (~$12 M) in the attack. Link.
In the wake of the attack, many were surprised to find Bancor had the ability to freeze the exchange and questioned if this made it centralized. In fact, those paying attention had noticed this long before. Link.
As it turns out, many well known DApps, including the aforementioned Augur, grant the smart contract owners broad central powers. Link.
This cuts at the heart of why one should use a smart contract and what "decentralization" really means. Using a smart contract is about providing value to users by relinquishing centralized power. The key question is: what do I want to make impossible in my system, even for me? If you don't have a compelling answer to that question, don't use a smart contract. Certainly, don't use a smart contract that simply encodes centralized power into it's rules.